Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, an...d cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If prophets or those who divine by dreams appear among you and promise you omens or portents, and the omens or the portents declar...ed by them take place, and they say, "Let us follow other gods" (whom you have not known) "and let us serve them," you must not heed the words of those prophets or those who divine by dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you, to know whether you indeed love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In New York--whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with a brio and an energy to put our own rude practitioners to... shame--not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.... Even the most chronically dispossessed appear prepared to endorse the legitimacy of the "haves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear load...ed with innuendo and fraught with implications.... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as th...ough plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Dandyism is especially likely to appear in those transitional ages in which democracy is not yet all-powerful and the aristocracy ...is only partially faltering and debased. In the confusion of such times certain men, déclassé, disgusted, idle, but all endowed with native strength, may conceive the project of founding a new kind of aristocracy, which will be all the more difficult to destroy as it will be based on the most precious and indestructible faculties, and on the God-given gifts which work and wealth cannot bestow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of ...our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it--the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with seque...nce and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form--it may be called fleeting or eternal--is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but ...women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »